Crowdsourcing Social Networks to Inform Public Policy

Photo of Anil Dash courtesy of Flickr/Joi

Six Apart co-founder Anil Dash plans to reinvent the way the government listens to its citizens. We’re not talking about wiretapping. Rather, he wants to solicit expert opinions on scientific matters through a new social network belonging to the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Expert Labs. Dash pumped his idea Wednesday afternoon during a keynote address at the Web 2.0 conference in New York.

The new Expert Labs social platforms, Dash said in a statement, have the potential to “make our government better, make our society better, advance scientific research and make people feel more connected to those social institutions that serve them.”

The blogging pioneer, whose company runs the Blogs.com, Movable Type, TypePad and Vox platforms, will direct the new organization, which will not be part of the government. Expert Labs will be funded by a $500,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation as part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, publisher of Science journal.

Dash said the goal of the Expert Labs incubator is not create a new social network, but to “us[e] open web technologies [to] make it easy for policy makers and scientists to connect with one another using the web sites and programs they’re already familiar with” such as Facebook and Twitter. Further inspirations for the program include the innovative digital arts program Eyebeam and Peer-to-Patent, which allows citizens to help find relevant information for assessing patent applications.

Dash broke the initiative down into three distinct stages, each involving a different slice of the American citizenry.

“We’re going to tap into the expertise of the policy community to identify what questions need to be answered,” he said. “We’re going to tap into the technology community to collaboratively build platforms that help get those questions answered and finally, we’ll tap into the science and technology communities to provide the answers themselves.”

Dash expects the networks incubated by Expert Labs to shape emerging policies on “almost any issue” including “science, technology, public health and more.”

Employees of the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy apparently contacted Dash after reading his August 14 blog post naming the federal government as “the most interesting new tech startup of 2009.”

“To know that the White House read what I said and was actually listening, that in itself is much more motivating than a million other things — like money or building something really cool,” Dash told theNew York Observer.

Science executive publisher Alan Leshner coined the term “cloud expertise” to characterize Dash’s crowdsourced approach to letting citizens inform public policy through the social networks they already use.

“Opening government up to a broad array of expertise is the next logical step in improving American policy-making,” said Leshner. “The goal of the Expert Labs initiative is to help policy-makers tap into the full spectrum of insights on critical issues, using technology to encourage the broadest possible participation by citizens.”

One big question that remains unanswered is how these social networks will filter out non-experts and those intent on derailing dialogue from the conversation, while still allowing outlying ideas to flow in from the fringes. Craigslist founder Craig Newmark expressed concern earlier this year that the same trolls who disrupt online conversations in most other places would disrupt it on official government social networks, if given the chance. Newmark is listed as a “friend of the Labs” on the Expert Labs website, so presumably this concern — no doubt shared by others — will inform how these expert networks are constructed. Details about how they will operate were not available, because the first step is to build them. The solution could be as simple as waiting until a critical mass of experts unfriends the trolls.

The administration has made several attempts to learn from the technology sector, having met with Facebook, Google and Ideo to improve the way it attracts job applicants. Using whatever social networks emerge from Expert Labs, citizen experts with good ideas should be able to contribute them to the public policy dialogue without taking a full-time federal job.